Are you looking for a guide about the SEO Key Performance Indicators and landed here? Then this article is for you because you are going to learn what SEO KPIs are and the necessity to track them. Additionally, you would learn about the most important KPIs that you should track for better results from SEO.
Search Engine Optimization is the best method to drive organic websites to business websites. So you need to optimize your website for the search engines to drive more traffic to them for better ROI. But it has been evolving over the years as the tricks and strategies that worked in the past don’t work today.
With Google being the most popular search engine, they are releasing constant updates to their search algorithm such as Panda, Penguin, etc to provide a better user experience. Optimizing the website for search engines and driving better ROI requires you to test things on a regular basis.
But to know if you are getting good results or not from the optimization done would be possible only when you track the results.No matter how much time you spend in planning the SEO strategy, KPIs tracked only proves the effectiveness of them.
SEO Key Performance Indicators are the metrics that one should track to identify the effectiveness of an SEO strategy or tactic implemented by checking the organic results obtained.
Selecting the right KPIs and monitoring their performance on a regular basis is essential to analyze and optimize the strategies to improve the results from SEO. Remember analyzing the right KPIs you would be able to save time and money focusing on the things that would help in achieving your business goals.
Wondering what metrics should you track? Well firstly you need to figure out the marketing goals that you want to achieve using SEO such as lead generation, conversions, etc, and then align with the SEO goals.
But there are many metrics that might make you feel overwhelmed as well. Don’t worry much as you are going to learn the most important KPIs that you should measure, monitor and analyze for best results from SEO.
1. Organic Traffic:
Organic Traffic is the most fundamental KPI of SEO that one should monitor and an increase in organic traffic means that you are going in the right direction because it is the most common objective of every business website.
Tracking this you can understand how effective your SEO strategy is in driving the visitors from search engines like Google, Bing, etc.Especially when you are looking to build brand awareness then growth in organic traffic indicates the growth in your search engine visibility ultimately reaching more people.
You can easily measure the organic traffic within a specific duration using the free tool Google Analytics by setting up the tracking code properly. Apart from that, there are other premium analytics tools like Adobe Analytics that can help in tracking the number of visitors on your website.
2. Organic Sessions:
Whenever a user visits, interacts with your website for a specific time frame, and leaves it one session is counted. Organic sessions are a good metric to track because the growth in the number of sessions indicates a positive impact of your SEO strategy.
However, a session gets timed out by default if a user is inactive for more than 30 minutes. So if people check your website after 30 minutes then a new session gets started and a single user can be responsible for multiple sessions.
Digging deep into the analytics data you can understand why the organic sessions were grown. Try to correlate the growth with other possible causes that resulted in the growth of number of sessions.
3. Average Session Duration:
Session duration in simple is the amount of time that a visitor spends on your website before leaving. Checking the average session duration you would be able to understand how engaging is your website for a visitor.
Remember the longer you make them stay the higher chance of converting a visitor into your customer. So create in-depth quality content that provides enormous value to the reader and makes them stay longer. Make sure to interlink relevant pages and have a proper site structure with clear navigation so that a visitor would spend a long time on your website.
To generate leads or sales you might be using different kinds of elements of popups, forms, etc. But some might affect the user experience reducing your session duration. So monitoring would it would help in removing the element that you have changed and provide a good user experience just like before.
4. Search Engine Rankings:
Ranking for a lot of relevant keywords of your business is important because your web pages can easily get ranked for your business name in the search engines. Remember to drive more traffic from search engines your web pages should rank higher that too on the first page of search results because most people don’t make it to the second page.
Tracking the keyword rankings is a prominent KPI because it directly impacts the number of visitors to your website and indirectly responsible for achieving your business objectives such as lead generation or sales. There are many tools that can help you with this like Semrush to monitor your position.
Remember the keyword rankings and the number of keywords you rank would generally fluctuate. But you might see a sudden drop in your rankings whenever any factor like algorithm update or spammy backlinks affects your website. So monitoring them regularly you would be able to investigate and make the necessary on-page or off-page optimization to improve your rankings.
5. Bounce Rate:
Bounce rate is a crucial KPI that should be measured because it is one of the ranking factors used by search engines. It is the percentage of the number of visitors who bounce without taking any action on your website and exit immediately.
A higher bounce rate indicates that there is an issue on your website such as low site speed, cluttered web design, improper navigation, etc. Generally, the bounce rate on a website varies from 40 to 60 percent depending on the industry of your business.
6. Business Goals-Leads/Conversions:
Just driving traffic to the website doesn’t help any business to generate revenue for your business.So you need to plan the business goals such as lead generation or conversions and track them to understand how effective SEO strategy is helping in achieving those business goals.
Hence they are one of the important Key Performance Indicators that you should track and measure the conversion rates as well. You can create different goals and measure them inside Google Analytics itself. Focusing on conversion rate optimization you might be able to improve the things and achieve your business goals faster from the SEO efforts made.
7. Organic Click-Through Rate:
Organic CTR that you would receive on your web pages ranking in the search engines is an important KPI to track because you would gain visitors only when the user makes a click. Additionally, CTR is one of the ranking factors used by search engines.
So make sure that the search snippets of your web pages are descriptive and convincing enough for the users to make them click. You can check the CTR using the Google Search Console and monitoring it you can figure out any kind of issues that might be affecting in converting the impressions into clicks.
8. Exit Pages:
Exit pages are the pages that the visitors visit before leaving your website or closing their browser. Top exit pages and exit rates are important KPIs to track because you might not be able to achieve the marketing goals from SEO when the visitor exits from your website on a page that you never wanted them to exit.
You can find the top exit pages from Google Analytics under the site content section and recheck them if there is any kind of issue.
9. Pages/Session:
Pages/Session is the number of pages visited by a user on your website in a session. When you have many pages as a part of the conversion funnel, it is important they browse through multiple pages so that they make the desired action on your website.
However, there is no benchmark for this metric as it totally depends on your site structure and the number of pages on your website. You might have a single-page website or eCommerce website with millions of pages but ensure that every page leads them to your lead generation or sales page.
Conclusion: Guide On The SEO KPIs
Measuring and monitoring all the above discussed SEO KPIs you would be able to improve results every month from the SEO strategies planned and implemented. You can perform technical optimizations or On-page optimization to achieve the marketing goals faster driving the best possible from the SEO efforts made.
Although, we are also one of the leading SEO agency serving clients since 2012. Get in touch with us if you are planning to have SEO services.